Experiences with Omniflop

[synthymike]

I was wondering if anyone has had any success using omniflop to write images of Emax sample disks on their PC?  I've installed it and it seems to work but when I put the disks into my Emax, it won't read them.  Has anyone had any luck or any tips on how to make it work properly?

[esynthesist]

Of course.
Many people have successfully used OmniFlop with their Emax.
It works fine on my PCs and laptops too.
When using the OmniFlop software itself (i.e. not only the driver with e.g. EMXP), make sure to select the correct Emax format (80 tracks * 2 sides * 10 sectors * 512 bytes), and to format disks before writing them.
But you'll need correct images to use OmniFlop natively - these are not widely spread on the internet. The more popular EM1 (EMX) images are not floppy disk images, they are just (parts of) sound banks.

Also make sure to use a TRUE internal floppy drive. Not a USB one (of course), but also not some "in between" solutions like floppy drive bays in some laptops. The motherboard's NEC µPD765 (compatible) floppy drive controller is being used by OmniFlop, so the floppy drive must be connected to that controller.

If all of the above is OK, and you still have problems, it may be caused by a big difference between the calibration of the Emax floppy drive and the PC floppy drive. Re-calibrating is not easy (never done it myself).
Sometimes it's sufficient to format the disks on the Emax and write/read - but not format - them on the PC.
But often people simply replace either the Emax floppy drive or the PC floppy drive.

The number of floppy drive issues/questions reported for E-Mu samplers like Emax has dropped dramatically the last 2 years. The main reason is probably that many people are simply not using them anymore, and prefer the HxC emulator or have upgraded their Emax with the SCSI kit which was made available by Ted (Yahoo group).